Note 37 — ESSAYS.
Reading edition
It is a pity that the want of early Italian writers deprives us of the means of judging of the truth of some of the marvellous traditional accounts of Etruscan monuments. The cavern sepulchres of Clusium may possibly have been connected with the labyrinth which Pliny, B. xxxvi., c. 13, on the authority of Varro, says, was under that incomprehensible tomb of Porsenna, the account of which reads like a fairy tale; and has uselessly employed some modern dreamers in impossible restorations.
The square body of the building, the four pyramids at the corners, and that in the centre, will remind the traveller of the modest monument, miscalled that of the Horatii and Curiatii, on the road between Laricia and Rome. To me it seems to have some resemblance with that raised by Simon Maccabeus to his family, about three centuries after Porsenna’s time, 1 Macc. xiii., v. 27, 28, 29, 30.